INFO Assistant Professor Caro Williams-Pierce is developing design recommendations as a member of PG County’s ER Task Force
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In a bustling emergency room, patients sit in hard, plastic chairs, their eyes occasionally darting to an old clock that ticks with agonizing slowness. The air hums with murmured conversations, distant beeping, and the soft cries of a child. A nurse rushes by, clutching charts, while an elderly man dozes, his walking cane propped against his leg. Some patients are relegated to a narrow hallway, the main room overflowing with people. Many have been waiting for hours, their only sustenance coming from snack food dispensed by a vending machine.
This scene is all too familiar in emergency rooms across Prince George’s County, where wait times are among the longest in the nation. College of Information (INFO) Assistant Professor Caro Williams-Pierce is determined to change that. As a county resident representative on the Prince George’s County Emergency Room Task Force—a position INFO Professor Andrew Fellows helped her secure—she’s applying her expertise in user-centered design to reimagine the emergency room experience.
“There’s so much that’s opaque about going to an emergency room,” Williams-Pierce says, highlighting the life-and-death implications of poor design. Research shows that mortality rates increase by 10% for each hour spent waiting in an emergency room. “You don’t want to know that the person that got let in before you has internal sepsis and so they’re going to die in two hours. That’s not information that should be shared with you as a stranger, but you should at least be able to get at the bare minimum, the awareness that you are still on the list and haven’t been completely forgotten. And that is a design issue.”
Maryland holds the dubious distinction of having the worst emergency room wait times in the United States. In Prince George’s County, the average wait time is 4.8 hours—a statistic that underscores the urgent need for systemic improvements. Councilwoman Wala Blegay established the Task Force to address this crisis, bringing together a diverse group of stakeholders, including EMS workers, medical staff, and patients and their families. The goal is to tackle the full complexity of emergency room challenges, from healthcare access and workforce shortages to inpatient bed availability. The Task Force will recommend strategies and policy initiatives, including legislative and regulatory actions, to reduce wait times effectively.
Williams-Pierce’s involvement in the Task Force is deeply personal. After spending hours in a local emergency room with an ill family member, she noticed how design flaws exacerbated the already stressful experience. “Before, I had focused more on commercial design, where the goal is to recruit and retain paying users,” she explains. “With emergency rooms, patients don’t really want to be there, don’t want to stay there, and definitely don’t want to come back, so commercial design principles aren’t going to work.”
Instead, Williams-Pierce is committed to redesigning these interactions to promote efficiency and reduce stress for patients. “Working on pain points for individual emergency rooms based upon the design, that’s one of those things that I want to contribute,” she says.
Her recommendations are both practical and transformative. She suggests clearer signage to help patients navigate to sign-in desks, as many mistake security desks for check-in areas. She also advocates for the use of televisions displaying waitlist updates or modern notification systems, such as text messages or physical buzzers, to alert patients when it’s their turn. These changes could significantly reduce interruptions, as patients often approach busy nurses to ask about their wait times, creating a ripple effect that slows down care for everyone.
While the Task Force addresses systemic issues, Williams-Pierce’s work focuses on the patient’s journey, making it more transparent, comfortable, and streamlined. “Redesigning the waiting room, with the focus on supporting the ER patient as they wait, can have a huge impact on PG County’s wait times,” she says. By prioritizing patient-centered design, she hopes to offer a measure of peace of mind during what is often a distressing and chaotic experience.